Has your Council “sold out” to P3 (Private Public Partnership)? ………. It’s just another plan to “squander your money”!

You may have heard of the P3 “push” now on by the Ontario Government. All dressed up as a “partnership” between your township and private owners who will run a project that is usually involved with upgrading and running an infrastructure project in your township that the Government hasn’t enough money to support.

Large projects such as waste water facilities that feed townships water to homes free of pollutants and safe to drink are one of the most expensive projects that most municipalities can’t afford to build and maintain on their own.

Along comes the P3 scheme that allows massive amounts of money to be borrowed by a private entity on behalf of the Municipality and amortized over 20 year plus loan agreements and is arranged by a Private entity with “PUBLIC” monies in partnership so that in the end a Private consortium runs it but the money to pay them is YOURS or public.

They run it, you pay for it. This may be a bit simplistic as it is rather much more involved but maybe some examples that follow in this story may represent how really BAD this P3 arrangement really is!

Why would the Liberals threaten such bluster over a schedule (slyly buried within the 2012 budget bill) to contract out and privatize services with little oversight from the legislature or the public? That is certainly not what they campaigned on.

Worse, almost all of the scandals that have bedevilled the Liberal government are directly tied to disastrous attempts to contract out public services.

Let’s review. First, there was the Brampton “public-private-partnership” (P3) hospital. In 2008 the auditor general revealed a long list of shortcomings:

• The facility’s construction costs increased from an initial estimate (under public procurement) of $357 million to $614 million. Despite this, the project’s size actually shrank.

• The project involved 60 consultants at a total cost of $34 million. About $28 million was due solely to the P3 project.

• The total P3 costs were $194 million more than the public model.

• This $194 does not include another $107 million in higher private sector P3 financing costs.

Then in 2009 there was the eHealth scandal. eHealth contracted out most of its work to contractors that charged big daily rates and then stuck us with more bills for even the slightest expense.

“Relying too heavily on consultants can be costly,” the auditor said. “Consultants are generally a lot more expensive than employees, and when they finish a project, they leave, often taking with them the expertise needed to maintain and operate the system they helped develop.”

The scandal led to the exit of health minister David Caplan, the CEO of eHealth and the eHealth board chair.

Then the auditor general revealed problems with contracting out at the government controlled Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs). Progressive Conservative MPP Jim Wilson noted that “invoices reveal that many of the same consultants who were getting rich off of eHealth were getting even richer by billing LHINs at the same time. In fact, one consultant who happens to be McGuinty’s former health adviser, billed $80,000 to the Toronto Central LHIN at the exact same time she was getting paid $327 an hour by eHealth.”

Hospitals were also severely embarrassed when sloppy contracting out was uncovered by the auditor general. One consultant who was paid $170,000 demanded another $3,000 when asked for receipts. Another, billing $1,100 for every eight hours of work, got paid while he vacationed in Japan.

Then there was the failure of a P3 long-term care (LTC) home in Windsor. The contractor repeatedly failed to deliver needed new beds. Ultimately, the ministry of health admitted the province was “not aware” the developer was facing a mountain of civil judgments. By the time the government finally cancelled the contract, almost 30 parties were registered in Superior Court against the developer. Just three weeks earlier, Health Minister Deb Matthews had expressed faith in the developer.

The failure of the privatized home has led to an ongoing hospital bed crisis in Windsor as hospital patients wait for LTC beds that don’t exist.

And then there is ORNGE, the air ambulance scandal.

ORNGE created numerous private businesses and then refused to give the auditor general access to the records of these businesses. So the auditor general was unable to obtain the lists of the shareholders of these businesses and the compensation contracts for the ORNGE bosses paid by these businesses.

By 2011, almost all of ORNGE’s senior managers became employees of one of the for-profit business. The result? The ORNGE CEO was paid $1.4 million (and also received another $1.2-million loan and cash advance the same year).

So now you may ask:“what’s going on here.and why are we losing our tax payers shirts over a program that is supposed to be so great and above board at least that’s what’s being claimed tonight at the P3 conference in Toronto”.

Is your Township involved in the P3 program????? If it is then ask some very serious questions about how your township got involved, who suggested it and if there are any officials in your township that are directly involved in it.

Do you think that Goderich would have unbiased representation from their CAO when discussing matters that would make binding agreements representing huge amounts of tax payers dollars over many years of payments in the P3 arena?

All one can say is that if the Mayor of Toronto was literally fired from his job for conflict of interest charges over fund raising for needy children but not handling his involvement quite correctly as defined by the Municipal Act, then citizens may take long hard looks at conflict of interest actions within their very own Townships before approving any participation in P3 projects!

Here is another example of what a P3 relationship can bring to a healthy Hospital and is now just a shallow representation of it’s former self!

Sian Thomson, Campbell River Courier-Islander

Published: Friday, November 23, 2012

Campbell River’s Lois Jarvis, Citizens for Quality Health Care representative, says the Public Private Partnership or “P3” entered into by the Vancouver Island Health Authority (VIHA) is not in the best interests of future patients and staff of the new hospital.

Jarvis said that current staff may be hired at a lesser rate or replaced with lower paid workers who are inexperienced.

Jarvis, who has spent many hours inside hospitals due to illnesses of family members, says examples abound of what can go wrong.

“Royal Jubilee (hospital in Victoria) for instance had a great cafeteria where even the neighbourhood people would visit and purchase good nutritious meals,” she said. “It was replaced by a private company and the hours were vastly reduced. They were not open on weekends, the food was awful and the patients were subjected to inedible food. I witnessed carts of uneaten meals being returned to the kitchen.

“While we are very happy to have a new hospital we think the taxpayers health dollars should be re-invested in our public health care system rather than go to large profits to private companies. There will be many current jobs on the line. The North Island Hospitals Plan is confidential and the planned P3 contracts are also secret so we have no way of knowing if the assurances from VIHA are true ‘that it is a super deal compared to the public health care hospital model.'”

In 2002 the B.C. government established Partnerships British Columbia, a company owned by the Province whose mandate is to implement “Public Private Partnership” Projects or P3’s. Government and business enter into a contract for the provision of assets and the delivery of services such as transit, airports, corrections, schools, roads and hospitals. In the case of the new Campbell River Hospital scheduled for completion in 2017, it will be designed, built, owned and operated by one of three finalists in the bidding process; Arbutus Health Care Partners, Plenary Health, or Tandem Health Partners, all private for-profit corporations, a consortium of banks, architects, property management, and private health care services. These corporations build their profit margins into the project including privatization of hospital management and hospital services.

The massive scale of public-private partnerships — which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars — make the projects more of a magnet for greed, experts say in the wake of a corruption scandal involving construction giant SNC-Lavalin Inc.

On Wednesday morning, investigators arrived at the home of former CEO Pierre Duhaime and charged him with fraud in relation to a $1.3-billion contract to build and maintain the McGill University Health Centre’s new hospital, one of Quebec’s highest-profile public-private partnerships (P3).

This is public money but it’s also public confidence — and corruption takes many forms

The allegations against Mr. Duhaime and another former SNC executive have shaken the financial community and raised questions about the P3 process, which business leaders and others have fought hard over the years to implement. At the beginning of this week, 1,500 people from around the world met at a downtown Toronto hotel to discuss the opportunities provided by public-private partnerships. Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, Alberta Premier Alison Redford, and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty stood before packed ballrooms and extolled the benefits of building infrastructure through private and public funding.

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Interesting, with over a hundred capital projects started in Ontario, this is all you could come with. If I do my calculations right, according to what you have posted, then the P3 market over 90% successful using public private partnerships. Not bad to say I can’t think of one single public capital project that ever came in on time or on budget. Whatever your point was, I don’t see it. It’s all about the details in a contract if you want to avoid any surprises.

Besides, the Ontario government is reducing hospital investments, including cancelling four previously announced major hospital projects and re-scoping two others, which will result in a reduction of borrowing $570 million. The government will only continue its investments in the 30+ new major hospital projects, and in 25 other major projects currently under construction.

It’s generally acknowledged Queen’s Park can no longer fill Ontario’s health-care, education and transportation infrastructure needs over the next 30 years using traditional methods of financing projects. The provincial government has stated that the public-private partnership is the only way it can afford to build new hospitals because of the huge deficit it faces.

So, if your community needs a new hospital and the province is not funding or approving the conventional capital project approach, a public private partnership is the way to go.

If one takes a look at history they will see what took place in Russia is taking place in Ontario and across Canada as well as the USA, Australia and all other Western Nations. Russia was a socialist country and then all the assets were stolen by the private sector. Who was in charge of Russia at the time? Gorbachev, the man who created Green Cross and helped pen the Earth Charter. Gorbachev is friends of David Rockefeller and Maurice Strong. These and other players brought us Agenda 21. Over the years all Western Nations were socialized (softened up) so the “Global Corporate Plan” could be instituted. It was Gorbachev who said “the environmental crisis (phony) is the ‘KEY’ that will unlock global government” Strong said they wanted to build “Earth Inc.” and it was Rockefeller who stated “…somebody has to take governments’ place, and business seems to me to be a logical entity to do
it.” – David Rockefeller – Newsweek International, Feb 1 1999. The environmental crisis is the global scam being used to usher in Global Corporate Government. We the people are being robbed of everything we and our forefathers built and paid for. Will we awaken in time to stop it?